is a fundamental—quite possibly the fundamental—aesthetic criterion, akin to harmony, integrity, and coherence. In the Phaedrus Plato holds that an oration should have u. analogous to the organic u. of a living creature; in the Symposium he suggests, in connection with the musical scale, that u. is a reconciliation of opposites or discords. The first full-blown Western theory of dramatic u. emerges in Aristotle’s Poetics . U. of plot is dramatic in that it expresses u. of action (the only u. Aristotle actually sponsors). Tragedy is held to be superior to epic because of its tighter internal relations (5.23–24). The ideal tragedy is an imitation of a unified action, large enough to be perspicuous while small enough to be comprehensible. Aristotle’s conception of u. is closely related to his artistic requirements of probability and necessity as they constitute the criteria for the connection of parts (6–9).
Aristotle is concerned only with dramatic u.; Horace has a looser but broader conception of u. which refers not only to action but, even more, to diction. He thinks of it as an effect of harmony obtained by skillful “order and arrangement”, analogous either to music or, more significantly, to the blending of colors, light, and shadow in painting (“ut pictura poesis”, q.v.). On the Sublime, the late-Cl. text long ascribed to Longinus, includes an analysis of an ode by Sappho in which intensity of feeling is seen to produce an organic u. which manifests itself as a reconciliation of opposing elements, a view which has obvious affinities to both Plato and Horace.
With the rediscovery of the text of Aristotle’s Poetics and its tr. and commentary by Castelvetro in the Ren. ( Poetica d’Aristotele vulgarizzata e sposta, 1570; abridged tr. A. Bongiorno, Castelvetro on the Art of Poetry, 1984), Aristotle’s argument for u. of action gradually became doctrine, then ossified into a prescription, one of the poetic “rules” (q.v.) of Fr. Classicism, the “Three Unities”—of action, time, and place. Aristotle had remarked that tragedies confined themselves to the events of a single day, but it was J. C. Scaliger who first established the tendency to identify the duration of the action represented with the duration of the representation. This was done in the name of verisimilitude (q.v.); Sidney thought it was common reason (i.e. concern for verisimilitude) as well as Aristotle’s precept that the stage should always represent but one place and the events of one day. Yet as formal criteria the three unities rather challenge the artist to concentrate on the autonomy of his work. In the heyday of the unities, in the drama of 17th-c. Fr. Classicism, Racine clearly drew strength from them, whereas Corneille strained against them—his play Le Cid occasioned a great controversy over the unities.
The three unities were never fully adopted in England, and Dryden assessed the reasons in the Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668, 1684), justifying the Eng. preference for subplot. Dr. Johnson’s “Preface to Shakespeare” (1765) showed, with great humor, how such mistaken scruples as to verisimilitude were given the lie by the very nature of dramatic illusion. The audience manages a shift of scene from Rome to Alexandria with the same ease they accepted the original setting as Rome. At the same time, the artifice of strictly observing the unities enhances the dramatic illusion wherever the concentration is psychologically compelling. Eng. critics since Dryden, and particularly Dennis, had gone back to Aristotle for a deeper grasp of the principle of dramatic u. in its interdependence with probability and necessity as felt by the audience. The three unities were thus not central to the more general concern with dramatic u. but merely a subset of it.
From antiquity up to the mid 18th c., theories of u. had been mainly theories of dramatic u. But 18th-c. theories of u. dealt with other genres besides drama, as Le Bossu’s Traité du Poëme épique (1675) and Addison’s Spectator papers on Paradise Lost show. And the rise of psychological aesthetics in the 18th c. opened the way to more adequate ideas of the role of u. in lyric poetry as well. New and enlarged conceptions of the creative imagination (q.v.) and the shift from a mechanistic to a vitalist worldview led to the romantic emphasis on organic u. This appeared variously as u. of feeling, u. as an imitation of the poet’s mind in the act of creation, and imaginative u., with the imagination being the shaping, unifying (“esemplastic”), and reconciling power (Coleridge, Biographia literaria, ch. 14).
The conception of poetic u. fostered by the New Criticism (q.v.) of the mid 20th c was directed against romanticism but remained romantic nonetheless. Organic u. was also a mainstay of the subsequent schools of formalist, psychological, and myth crit. (qq.v.), both as a standard of judgment and as a method of exposition. Thus, even beyond the explicitly Aristotelian emphasis of the Chicago school (q.v.), poetic u. was also explained by I. A. Richards as a reconciliation of impulses; by Cleanth Brooks as a reconciliation of thought and feeling manifested in the interaction of theme with lang. and metaphor; by the surrealists as a unifying of the total mind through freeing of the unconscious; by the Freudians through poetic analogues of the “dream-work” following associations of symbols; and by the Jungians in the replication of archetypal motifs.
At the same time, the principle of u. was variously questioned and even made problematic by some of these same movements, just as some romantics had developed an aesthetic of the fragment. Indeed, such a reversal may be implicit in the interiorization on of the sense of u. which drew it away from formal constraints. The structuralist and poststructuralist tendencies which followed in the wake of New Crit. may outwardly have resembled it in its attention to the complexities and tensions which articulate a given work as a whole, but in effect they showed its u. to be contingent, relative, and superficial. The text is a meeting place for myriad relations that have no common objective form; real u. is either that of the underlying systems or an illusion, the lure held out by the surface of the work. The poetic gesture of imposing or inducing u. is just a jar in Tennessee, as poetry itself turns against that pretension. Yet the will to form may always have to express itself in art by breaking with accustomed modes of u., and one sort of crit. will find its task in showing that, where a work is experienced as art, some manner of u. has been created and communicated. For further discussion of modes of u. and the postmodernist reaction thereto,
User Comments Add a comment…